empath75

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1wnrtwr/cla... There's more info here.

I'm not sure that is a meaningful distinction. All a black hole _is_, is mass. If you take away the mass, you are taking away the black hole.

The entire blackhole will eventually evaporate, so yes it is literally escaping from the black hole.

It works as one shot. The only feedback i gave for the one I had it do was the music was too loud, and then after i told it, it was great, it said: "Your notes on the music balance made a real difference.", which was kind of weirdly passive aggressive!

It was good enough that our CEO and marketing team are in a room trying different ideas with it after I showed it to them an hour ago.

Annoying your local city council is exactly the sort of speech protected by the first amendment.

WOW

I did one for our company and showed it to the CEO and now I am talking him out of just yeeting it directly onto social media.

Giving someone the finger is not a crime.

I spent a couple of days with it and it is fast and cheap but not especially good at classifying.

I think this is a case where just drawing a "line goes up" extrapolation is incredibly misleading because there is _tremendous_ economic pressure to get costs down, and costs are very tightly tied to energy use. All of these systems are incredibly inefficient right now and have a lot of room to go down in energy use. I'd guess that the absolute _floor_ is burning model weights directly to silicon and that's like a 90+% reduction in energy use.

Duke Huan was in his hall reading a book. The wheelwright P'ien, who was in the yard below chiseling a wheel, laid down his mallet and chisel, stepped up into the hall, and said to Duke Huan, "This book Your Grace is reading - may I venture to ask whose words are in it?"

"The words of the sages," said the duke.

"Are the sages still alive?"

"Dead long ago," said the duke.

"In that case, what you are reading there is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old!"

"Since when does a wheelwright have permission to comment on the books I read?" said Duke Huan. "If you have some explanation, well and good. If not, it's your life!"

Wheelwright P'ien said, "I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I chisel a wheel, if the blows of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slides and won't take hold. But if they're too hard, it bites in and won't budge. Not too gentle, not too hard - you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can't put it into words, and yet there's a knack to it somehow. I can't teach it to my son, and he can't learn it from me. So I've gone along for seventy years and at my age I'm still chiseling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn't be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old."

You should generally but not always read any statement by Socrates in a Plato dialogue as a statement that Plato is putting into the mouth of Socrates, not something Socrates himself said. There is a gradation, though. The Apology was probably very close to what socrates actually said, and some of the later dialogues (The Republic, for example) probably bear little relationship to anything Socrates said.

But, and this is important, Plato almost certainly did not agree with everything he had Socrates say in every dialogue. Sometimes he is just playing with ideas. Personally, I think Plato is just being provocative about books in this dialogue to push an idea as far as he can.

I think when people think about CRTs and NES/Atari, they aren’t thinking about _monitors_ they are thinking about the low quality TVs and hooked up through the antenna adapter, which absolutely did wash pixels out to some extent.

LLMs need a lot of help to get to any kind of complicated proof, really. And yes, they get in moods. I spent 3 weeks trying to prove something and frequently had to try and convince Claude that it wasn't impossible and that it could really do it.

Yeah I think to calibrate you should probably look to Native American words that made it into English — place names, local foods and wildlife, cultural items. Those are going to be your substrate borrowings for most languages.

Also, “not having a known etymology” is weak evidence for borrowing, full stop, let alone for borrowing from a substrate. There are lots of very common words in english (dog, pig, boy, girl) that have no known etymology which are incredibly unlikely to impossible to have come from a substrate language.

Languages invent new words and sound patterns endogenously all the time.

I sort of have this suspicion that the kinds of phenomena that we can even apprehend are pretty closely related to what we can reason about mathematically, and the reason that math seems to work so well to model behavior that we understand says more about how our brain works than how the universe works.

If a phenomenon isn’t model-able by relatively simple math it doesn’t even look like a phenomenon to us, it looks like a chaotic mess.

Which is to say that unless something has mathematical coherence it is more or less invisible to our experience.

There are a lot of folklore jailbreaks that look like that, might have fell into a basin of attraction for whatever reason.

If the goal is merely to "win at chess", then yes, an LLM using stockfish is better than any human alone at performing the task. When you are talking about what AI agents are capable of doing, there is no such thing as "cheating". They are as capable as the tools they can use effectively. The entire history of human civilization was driven by effectively using tools to achieve goals.

An average human would have a physical chess board in front of them to remind them of the current state.

> It's a great test of cognitive abilities.

It isn't. Stockfish running on your laptop can beat every human being on earth easily at chess. It's not intelligent _at all_ in any sense that matters.

I want you to consider how relevant this is in any practical sense.

First -- most _people_ cannot do this, without having a physical board in front of them.

Second -- Claude Code is perfectly capable of downloading and running stockfish. People focus too much on LLMs by themselves as the entity of concern instead of the entire harness and all of it's capabilities together.

Just have your agent answer their agent.

It was literally a prompt to fill in a spreadsheet with data that they didn't have access to, and they used rubygems as an internet proxy basically since they were sandboxed.

IMO, it _currently_ requires a lot of skill because it will frequently take wrong turns and dead ends and needs suggestions and steering to get there. You do need to understand what it is doing at least a little bit and to understand the general landscape of the problem, and to at least have a sense of whether and why the problem is tractable at all.

I spent about a month walking through proving something with Claude a few months ago and it _constantly_ told me that it was impossible and I should stop working on it, right up until it proved it.

This is such a silly thing to say in 2026

When I first started playing with lean I accidentally defined a group in such a way that it was reduced to triviality. It had one object in it, so everything in the group was trivially equal to everything else. It was not the group that I was trying to prove something about, but the proof went through.

It was too easy, so I double checked my definitions, but it is quite easy to do something like that. And Claude does things like that quite frequently.

I am going through the exercise right now of trying to get Claude to formalize a published paper and it is a _struggle_ to get it not to take shortcuts or prove approximations of the paper’s theorems and then tell you it’s done.

It's also sort of a misleading gloss of what is going on in that dialogue, which, it is important to note _is in a book_ -- one of many that Plato wrote. Plato has Socrates recount a story (supposedly) from ancient Egypt in which an Egyptian god claims that books will make people forgetful. He never makes that claim himself, as a character, and certainly Plato didn't believe it, because he wrote lots of books before and after that dialogue. The general thrust of that section of the dialogue is that writing can be a useful tool for remembering, but _not_ sufficient for learning, which requires person to person interaction and dialogue.

This is a "human alignment" problem in this case. OpenAI acted like complete assholes about this, from the beginning until they announced it. Not ChatGPT, the people that were in charge of the project.

> the US has no resolve.

This would be the wrong conclusion to take from it. Trump is incredibly unpopular domestically and the war is dumb and pointless and was sprung on the US population by surprise and planned and executed with complete and utter incompetence, and the negative economic consequences are way out of proportion to any conceivable benefit we will get out of it. It's not a lack of resolve, it's a rational reaction to incompetent leadership.

"The West's enemies" have to be careful not to give the US an excuse to commit to a real war, rather than fight it with basically pocket change the way we are now while we look for a way out.